Prozess Kahle v. Ashcroft in den USA/ Niederlage für " The Internet Archive" und "Prelinger Archives"

[delin@xxxxxx (Delin, Peter)]

Zur allgemeinen Information: In den USA haben das "Internet Archive"
http://www.archive.org/  und "Prelinger Archives"
http://www.archive.org/movies/prelinger.php  offenbar die 1. Runde in
einem wichtigen Prozess um eine freiere Zugänglichkeit zu älterer
Literatur und zu älteren Filme verloren.

Peter Delin/Videolektorat
Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin
http://www.zlb.de/index.html


>From The Chronicle For Higher Education
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Judge Dismisses Challenge to 4 Laws That Archivists Say Skew Concept of
Copyright
By ANDREA L. FOSTER
http://chronicle.com/


A federal judge has ruled against legal scholars and archivists who
challenged current
copyright law in hopes of making it easier to archive old literature and
films on
the Internet, where they would be available free to the public.
The case, Kahle v. Ashcroft, pitted two archive groups -- the Internet
Archive, 
a nonprofit digital library, and the Prelinger Archives, which preserves
films --
against the U.S. Justice Department. The archivists argued that four
copyright laws
are collectively keeping people from gaining access to "orphan" works:
out-of-print books, old films, and academic articles that have little or
no
commercial
value. 

The laws that the archivists fault are the Copyright Act of 1976, the
Berne
Convention
Implementation Act of 1988, the Copyright Renewal Act of 1992, and the
Sonny
Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. A central part of the archivists'
argument
is that laws granting copyright protection to all works, even those for
which the
creators have not sought protection, have radically altered the
"traditional
contours of copyright."

But Judge Maxine M. Chesney, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern
District
of California, disagreed with that claim and dismissed the case without
hearing 
arguments on it. In an opinion based in part on the U.S. Supreme Court's
2003 decision
in Eldred v. Ashcroft (The Chronicle, January 16, 2003), Judge Chesney
wrote
that
laws that abolished the requirement that works be registered to receive
copyright
protection do not "alter the scope of copyright protection, but merely
determine
the procedures necessary to obtain or maintain such protection."

Lawrence Lessig, a prominent expert on law and technology, handled the
challenge
for the archivists, along with two other legal scholars. All three are
affiliated
with Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society.

Jennifer S. Granick, executive director of the center, said on Monday
that
the judge
got it wrong. 

"If you have a law that says you don't have to apply for copyright
protection,"
said Ms. Granick, "that clearly is about scope." The plaintiffs plan to
appeal the ruling.